The general goal in this research is a vibrotactile vocoder for the perception of speech. One specific objective will be to explore the degree to which tactile information processing is affected by the limitation in temporal acuity and temporal short-term memory, and the degree to which this type of limitation can be bypassed by the use of a scanning, or pattern-movement technique that uses spatial acuity and spatial memory to augment temporal capabilities. A second objective will be to develop a coding scheme for a vibrotactile vocoder which uses in a near optimum way the information processing capacity of the skin. Toward attaining the first objective, the effect of scanning on the discriminability of time displacements between the onset times and/or offset times of stimuli placed at different locations on the arm will be determined, as well as the ability of the tactile system to correctly identify the time sequence of complex patterns when presented at rates approaching the channel capacity of the tactile system. To help attain the second objective, some measurements are being made of the information processing capability of the region of interest, tentatively chosen as the forearm, using waveforms other than sinusoidal. In most previous work with tactile vocoders, the frequency variable has been encoded into a spatial variable. We will also explore the simultaneous use of stimulus frequency and location to convey frequency information.